Saturday, January 14, 2012

My Dear Boss

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Astaro VPN Adapter Issue on Windows XP

There is an issue with running the Astaro SSL VPN on Windows XP. I have seen that this has affected other people, and have not seen any solutions (short of the drastic step of running "netsh int ip reset logfile.txt" and "netsh winsock reset catalog" to wipe out the entire winsock configuration), so I thought I would post this combination of steps that seems to work for me.

The symptom is if you get the following error message when trying to log in to the SSL VPN:

"Warning: route gateway is not reachable on any active network" or

"route gateway is not reachable on any active network adapters"

You will not be able to access anything on the network, even though you are logged in to the VPN with a valid IP address.

These steps resolve the problem for me:

1. Make sure using wireless connection (not ethernet)

2. Log in to the VPN

3. Open Network Connections (Click Start, click Run, type ncpa.cpl , and then click OK.) and see which adapter is "Connected" (e.g. "Local Area Connection 5")

4. Right-click and select "Disable". This will log you out of the VPN

5. Go to the Device Manager (under Control Panel / System / Hardware) and under "Network Adapters" locate the Astaro SSL VPN network adapter and right-click to uninstall it

6. Run "C:\Program Files\Astaro\Astaro SSL VPN Client\bin\addtap.bat"

7. Observe a new adapter in the Network Connections panel. Under Advanced / Advanced Settings, make sure the new adapter is at the top of the list (use the arrows)

8. Try to log in to the VPN again.

This seems to work about 75% of the time. If not, repeating the steps a second time sometimes works.

Notes

In step 7 or 8, if the new adapter says "Connected, Firewalled" under "Status", right-click and go to Properties, select "Advanced", click "Settings" under "Windows Firewall" and turn off.

To delete an adapter from the registry (not sure if this works, but can try as last resort if step 5 above is not working), go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}. This didn't seem to be working, but may require a re-boot after deleting for the list to refresh.

If you get the message "All TAP-Win32 adapters on this system are currently in use", this means you need to do step 6 above to add an Astaro SSL VPN adapter.